FarCry 1.3: Crytek’s Last Play Brings HDR and 3Dc for the First Time. Page 10

FarCry title and its engine proved to be the most technologically advanced released in 2004 so far. The game that has been in development since 2001 eventually acquired support for technologies that still have to make it into the mainstream market, the Shaders 2.0b/3.0, HDR and 3Dc. They say the patch 1.3 is the last patch for the FarCry, but it brings loads of important innovations and we decided that we should pay them a great deal of attention.

FarCry version 1.3: Out-of-box performance

Now that you know how to enable unsupported HDR and 3Dc capabilities in FarCry, let us take the final look on performance of various graphics cards in the game you get out-of-the-box with the latest official drivers from ATI and NVIDIA.

Training Level, Pure Mode

As usually, we begin our investigation with “Training” level that includes loads of vegetations, grass and water, along with caverns and huts, just like many other levels of FarCry.

“Training” level demonstrates pretty obvious performance advantage the new generation of graphics cards have over the old breed of GPUs.

With the highest possible settings, but without maximum full-scene antialiasing and anisotropic filtering, the GeForce FX and the RADEON 9600 XT/X600 XT do not deliver playable fps already in 1280x1024 resolution.

ATI’s RADEON X800 and NVIDIA’s GeForce 6800, however, still manage to offer nice framerate even in 1600x1200. Pay attention that the GeForce 6600 GT can deliver more than 40fps in 1600x1200.